Читать книгу The Songaminute Man: How music brought my father home again - Simon McDermott, Simon McDermott - Страница 6

Pride of Britain Awards, November 2016

The lights were blinding.

I was sat surrounded by some of Britain’s most famous faces – Simon Cowell, Stephen Hawking and Prince Charles. Two cameramen made their way over to my table, one positioning himself right in front of me. I could see the red light. I knew they were recording and my heart was pounding. On the stage, James Corden filled the screen, his voice booming across the room:

‘There’s a carpool karaoke star I want to pay tribute to this evening that isn’t to do with me. He’s 80 years old and he has the voice of Frank Sinatra and instead of Sunset Boulevard, he likes to cruise the mean streets of Blackburn, Lancashire. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr Ted McDermott and his son Simon.’

The screen cut to a video of me driving with my dad in the car as he belted out ‘Volare’. I felt pride and heartbreak all at once. There was the dad I knew and loved. He was happy and full of joy, with little sign of the confusion and aggression that had blighted our lives for the past four years. The interview cut to a picture of Mum and Dad when they were younger and then to Mum as she sat there with tears in her eyes: ‘You do get upset about it. The person that you knew is slowly going away,’ she said.

How did we get here?

My dad, Ted, was diagnosed with dementia in 2013, when he was 77. He can no longer recognize his family or where he is. It’s been devastating to watch this insidious disease take him over, but through everything, music has been the one thing that’s kept us together. Dad still loves to play his records at full volume as he sings around the house, remembering the words to every song, even if he doesn’t recognize anything else around him.

Living with dementia means that no day is ever the same. There are moments when Dad is happy and caring and moments when he can get incredibly angry and upset but not know why. Evenings he’ll often spend hours wandering around the house, shouting my mum’s name, or looking for people who aren’t there.

It was after one particularly bad outburst that I took Dad driving around the Ribble Valley in Lancashire, playing his old backing tracks to try and calm him down. It didn’t take long before he was singing along in perfect tune. Dad – for a moment – was back to his old self and all the confusion and aggression had gone.

Those drives in the car gave us something to hold on to during the really bad times. I started to record them just for myself and Mum, but then I had the idea of uploading them to Facebook, with a link to a fundraising page I’d set up to support the Alzheimer’s Society who’d supported us. In just a few short weeks the videos had been watched millions of times worldwide. The donations came pouring in and before I knew it we had raised over £150,000 for the charity to help other families like us.

Now I was about to go onstage to receive a Pride of Britain Award for raising dementia awareness. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life as Sir Cliff Richard and Dame Joan Collins appeared to present me with the award. ‘I can’t believe your dad sells more records than I do,’ said Cliff.

For Dad, his one true passion has always been music. He’s been singing since he was a young boy, growing up in a noisy house with thirteen brothers and sisters, and his musical ability was always encouraged. Although my grandparents didn’t have a lot, the family never went short. My grandad was hard-working, with a job in the forge and lots of friends down at the local pub, while my grandmother was a strong and loving mother who knew everyone on the estate where she lived. Dad had a typical childhood for the time – his younger years were about football or playing out in the woods at the back of the estate. Once he left school, one of his many jobs was as a Butlin’s Redcoat, where he travelled the country singing in clubs. He earned himself the nickname ‘The Songaminute Man’ because of the many different songs he could perform by heart.

Dad had just turned 65 when we started to notice his memory going. Mum picked up on it first – he would forget what he was doing, forget names and faces. Next came the aggression, the frustration and finally the realization that the person we knew was slowly fading away.

I’d always hoped Dad would write his own book one day – not least because he was a legendary storyteller when I was a kid. At family parties he’d often be found with a group of my cousins at his feet, enthralled by his stories. The tales would be greatly embellished, dramatic and over the top, but to young kids they were mesmerizing. One Christmas years ago, I bought him a blank notebook in which to write everything down, but dementia came and took away his past before he had a chance.

And now it’s my job, as his son, to capture as much as I can about Dad before he’s lost to us for ever. This book documents his life growing up as the eldest of fourteen children, his life onstage, his loves, and then later the devastating effects of dementia on him and his family – as well as how we pulled together to help him finally receive the recognition for his singing that he always deserved. Things are very mixed up for Dad – he can no longer tell his story without it becoming confused – so this is his story as told by others. I spoke to those people who knew him best: his remaining brothers and sisters, his friends, his teenage sweetheart and my mum, his wife of more than forty years. Where possible, these interviews have been used fully, alongside first-hand stories that Dad told me over the years. I’ve done my best to recreate them as best as I can, though I know some stories will be for ever lost in time.

I so desperately miss my dad. Even though he’s still around and I see him all the time, he’s very much in his own world, and it’s painful to watch Mum look after the man she loves. The thing is, when he was well I never really understood him for what he was. To me he was just Dad – the guy at home who would tell me off, get in the occasional mood, go out singing, love being the centre of attention, fly off the handle, care too much and be embarrassingly quirky. This book has become not only the story of my dad’s life but my story, too. I’ve been given the gift of finally discovering the person my father is, why he behaves the way he does, his flaws, his weaknesses and his hidden strengths, which has, in turn, revealed to me who I am.

When I was a young kid I thought my dad was the greatest man in the world. I lost that feeling for a while. But now I can say I’m the proudest man on the planet to have Ted McDermott as my father – the kind, the moody, the sensitive, the egotistical, the complicated, the brilliant, Songaminute Man.

This is his story.